1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to digital voice communications and, more particularly, to the removal of swirl artifacts from code excited linear prediction (CELP) based coders, such as vector-sum excited linear predictive (VSELP) coders, when operating in background noise consisting of low or medium levels of non-periodic signals.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Cellular telecommunications systems in North America are evolving from their current analog frequency modulated (FM) form towards digital systems. Digital systems must encode speech for transmission and then, at the receiver, synthesizing speech from the received encoded transmission. For the system to be commercially acceptable, the synthesized speech must not only be intelligible, it should be as close to the original speech as possible.
Codebook Excited Linear Prediction (CELP) is a technique for speech encoding. The basic technique consists of searching a codebook of randomly distributed excitation vectors for that vector which produces an output sequence (when filtered through pitch and linear predictive coding (LPC) short-term synthesis filters) that is closest to the input sequence. To accomplish this task, all of the candidate excitation vectors in the codebook must be filtered with both the pitch and LPC synthesis filters to produce a candidate output sequence that can then be compared to the input sequence. This makes CELP a very computationally-intensive algorithm, with typical codebooks consisting of 1024 entries, each 40 samples long. In addition, a perceptual error weighting filter is usually employed, which adds to the computational load.
A number of techniques have been considered to mitigate the computational load of CELP encoders. Fast digital signal processors have helped to implement very complex algorithms, such as CELP, in real-time. Another strategy is a variation of the CELP algorithm called Vector-Sum Excited Linear Predictive Coding (VSELP). An IS54 standard that uses a full rate 8.0 Kbps VSELP speech coder, convolutional coding for error protection, differential quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulation, and a time division, multiple access (TDMA) scheme has been adopted by the Telecommunication Industry Association (TIA). See IS54 Revision A, Document Number EIA/TIA PN2398.
The current VSELP codebook search method is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,817,157 by Gerson. Gerson addresses the problem of extremely high computational complexity for exhaustive codebook searching. The Gerson technique is based on the recursive updating of the VSELP criterion function using a Gray code ordered set of vector sum code vectors. The optimal code vector is obtained by exhasutively searching through the set of Gray code ordered code vector set. The Electronic Industries Association (EIA) published in August 1991 the EIA/TIA Interim Standard PN2759 for the dual-mode mobile station, base station cellular telephone system compatibility standard. This standard incorporates the Gerson VSELP codebook search method.
The CELP based coders, which use LPC coefficients to model input speech, work well for clean signals; however, when background noise is present in the input signal, the coders do a poor job of modelling the signal. This results in some artifacts at the receiver after decoding. These artifacts, referred to a swirl artifacts, considerably degrade the perceived quality of the transmitted speech.